New Mac Pro, Restoring from Timemachine, iWeb, Sleeping

[ajbrehm]

I finally received my new Mac Pro. That was fairly difficult because Apple's courier only delivers during daytime and during daytime I, like probably most people who can afford to buy from Apple, am at work.

But my I managed to convince Apple to tell the courier to deliver on Friday when my flat mate was home.

The Mac Pro arrived and I set it up using a Timemachine backup from my old iMac.

Before I will tell of the positives I want to make known the following issues I ran into:

1. While restoring the Timemachine backup (some 300 GB) was very fast (two hours), some things didn't work afterwards. Some programs couldn't remember that they were licensed and for some reason Timemachine didn't restore the /Developer folder (but it did restore /sw with my Fink installation).

2. After restoring the Timemachine backup became useless when I couldn't continue backing up to it. I had to erase it and start anew with the new machine even though the name was the same as the old machine "Xerxes". When I started a backup the first time, Timemachine created a backup folder "Xerxes 2" for the new machine instead of continuing the old backup.

3. iWeb "forgot" that all my sites had been published and publishing only changes lead nowhere. I had to republish everything which took a LONG time. When I simply copied iWeb and the Web site file between my iMac and MacBook, I had no such problems.

4. The Mac Pro won't fall asleep automatically even though it is set to do so after one hour of no activity. Don't know why.

5. I created a Firewire network between the Mac Pro and the iMac and the best speed I could get was about 10 Mb/s. It should have been 400 MB/s. Don't know why.

(Continue in comments...)

 

[ajbrehm]

And the positive...

I got an 8-core with 8 GB of memory and two 1 TB hard disks. Screen is 24" Apple Cinema Display. Mac OS X and everything (home directories etc.) is installed on the first. The second is for video and VMware VMs.

I have three VMs so far, mostly migrated from my iMac (Core 2 Duo, 3 GB) and I modified the memory settings. 🙂

a) Vista 64: 4 GB, two logical CPUs

b) XP 32: 2 GB, one logical CPU

c) SuSE Linux 64: 1 GB, one logical CPU

So here is the fun:

1. _Love_ the display. Absolutely love it. It's so big and black, it's wonderful. I argued with my flat mate whether watching new Doctor Who episodes on it would be a good introduction and whether we should call it a christening, but the word "christening" seemed inappropriate (neither of us is a Christian) so we thought perhaps the right word is "inaugurate". We finally watched Doctor Who when we inaugurated my first black screen.

2. 8 GB of memory are great. So is booting VMs from another hard disk. I used to worry about memory because there wasn't much of it (3 GB) and because assigning too much memory to a VM would cause it to take longer to suspend. But now there is a seemingly infinite amount of memory and I don't suspend VMs any more, I just send them into the background (headless mode) and forget about them until I need them again. If not used they will be swapped away unnoticeably. I now constantly have a 64 bit Vista (4 GB) and a 32 bit XP (2 GB) running in the background.

3. The 16 logical CPUs (2 CPUs times 4 cores times 2 hyperthreads, hyperthreads are 30% complete cores) are an infinite magazine of resources. Only 2.5 of the logical CPUs are at use when the computer does a lot. Whenever more power is needed, there is more CPUs to use. It's surreal.

4. FINALLY enough USB ports.

5. The Mac Pro is rather silent and does not get very warm. I was worried about that. I hate that it doesn't have its own modem but I had an Apple USB modem lying around. Need a modem to be able to wake up the computer remotely from work or so.

 

[J&JPolangin]

...nice write up so far...